GDT kms: 32.3

When we woke up and packed up, we were pretty shocked to discover other campers were also up and about. Kyle and I both double checked our watches/phones to make sure the times all matched and we didn’t accidentally sleep in an hour. The campground was also so busy that our morning bathroom stop involved a lineup for the outhouse. After we made our way through the line, we were quickly on our way and started ascending towards Tumbling Pass. We soon had a wet stream crossing – we’d been quite happy the past few days to have no wet crossings and hoped the hot day would dry our feet quickly.

At the top of the pass, we were rewarded with beautiful views of the surrounding glaciers and our first of many other hikers we would encounter today.

When we got to the Tumbling Creek campground, we were pleased to find a brand new outhouse (hopefully one of many Parks Canada will be installing this summer as most of the ones we’ve used so far have been very very full.)

After ascending to Wolverine and Rockwall Passes, we hit the 500 km point of the trail! We made a little marker, hopefully it lasts a little while!

After this point, we started encountering several families hiking with kids under 10 (even several under 5). I’m not sure if they were all together, or if it happens to be “Take your kids hiking” week, but it was nice to see that our future ambitions aren’t too unreasonable.

We walked through a light storm on the final descent to Helmet Falls, but thankfully it let up before we had to climb again up to Goodsir Pass. The descent from the pass was at a nice gentle grade, but took us much longer than we would have liked due to needing to cross several avalanche paths and a non-trivial number of downed trees on the trail.

We rolled into camp just before 8pm making this our longest day yet in terms of hours hiked. Tomorrow should be nice and relaxing as the trail seems to follow an old road into Field.